Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card
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Sep 26, 2014 9:16 AMby GavMackem,It's kind-of on topic - why I love my 17 inch 2011 despite Apple not cooling it properly. The SSD upgrade in a 2011 is one of the most awesome increases in performance you'll ever get in OSX. I get clients laughing, more amazed than any Apple keynote about a phone by a country mile!
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Sep 26, 2014 9:16 AMby Csound1,I still have several 750XT's as well as the newer 1TB drives. They are fitted into 2 of the Mac portables but most of them live in external single or jbod enclosures.
The SSD's are all in newer machines (except for my trusty 2009 MBP) which has an Intel SSD in it now, and runs very well on it.
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Sep 26, 2014 9:24 AMby GavMackem,Csound1 wrote:
I still have several 750XT's as well as the newer 1TB drives. They are fitted into 2 of the Mac portables but most of them live in external single or jbod enclosures.
The SSD's are all in newer machines (except for my trusty 2009 MBP) which has an Intel SSD in it now, and runs very well on it.
Most of mine have gone now. Only spinners I buy are 3/4tb for the storage array. One thing I also forgot about SSD's in the past was the drives firmware not liking the controller. Sandforce chipset models (some Intels) I had my head banging against a wall with the nvidia and C2D Intel sata chipsets in earlier MBP models
The 2011 works fantastic with Crucial and Samsung - so does the rest of Apple's range also!
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Sep 26, 2014 9:54 AMby rnnclary,I have same problem.. A tech came over since my MBP is out of warranty. Discovered fan was not turning on. Screen would flicker more and more when it got hot. Downloaded a program. smcFanControl. I keep the fan on and the computer cool. So far so good. TWO DAYS NO FLICKER. Tech thinks it a update issue with Mavericks. Apple won't fix cause Yosemite is coming out soon. Mu MBP runs cool and so far no problems. Very frustrating. Apple should fix this sooner. Lots of similar problems.
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Sep 26, 2014 9:54 AMby GavMackem,Forgot to mention this before the edit expired - work gets in the way.
He's backed up my argument that in an awful lot of cases the word Genius in an Apple store = oxymoron. Power consumption of an SSD causing the problem - I think I would have laughed uncontrollably at that moment.
I cannot help myself visiting a store with a client by remaining silent with them and listening to the amazing tales they can tell until I cant handle the ridiculous nonsense I'm hearing and can contain myself no more - usually by saying "I've been taking Macs apart and working on them since before you were born"
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Sep 26, 2014 10:04 AMby Csound1,We may slip into disagreement here but in my experience many cases of overheating trace back to software issues, I am lucky that I impose a standard setup on all the Macs we use, and I have no time for 'fripperies' Having established an image that works and fulfils the requirements it goes on all the production machines.
A few are used by the engineering staff, they get more leeway with what can be installed, but not too much. I install what I need. Over the years hardware faults have been very rare, but the fact that we rarely warm one up even over long shows helps with that I believe.
This instance seems to be too varied and widespread for that, but hard data is really difficult to get.
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Sep 26, 2014 10:29 AMby GavMackem,With the 2011's 15/17 its hardware that's by far the biggest culprit, but software issues do crop up a lot which give heat spikes, but in a lot of cases (and now it's much easier to do so post OSX Lion) it's just a case of booting while holding down option, selecting recovery HD and running Disk Utility of that to repair the permissions on the primary Macintosh HD volume while it's unmounted. I do this every time I do an OSX and even point upgrade by default, with an SSD it takes literally minutes.
The instance with these models is primarily heat related, though poor lead free solder was in the market during Q1-Q3 2011 as electronic industry sites will attain may also possibly be a factor.
When I hear no reports on any of the 2011's I have re-pasted in the past have failed their GPU, I can only wonder, and similar things with the 27 inch iMacs at a broadcast client I re-pasted post AppleCare expired. They were flogged to death as substitute Mac Pro's, 2 of the 3 had a new GPU every year from AppleCare and all of them ran hot as **** on the back and very loud indeed. I redone the thermals 9 months ago and when asked about how they were doing they said they still run much cooler, quieter, the fans still spin up but nowhere near as much and stop far quicker. No broken GPU's either, funny that.
Add that to the list of all the other computers I've cooled by optimising the thermals for years - I started I think about 1996 with Voodoo 3d add on cards. Macintosh cubes sounding from industrial gas blowers to small hair dryers a memorable early Mac modification. This glaring oversight and imperfection with thermal dies that I have with Apple started, long long ago, the unibody design from the start I could see the pasting job wasn't good enough back in 2008 and perhaps users with 2011's being made to suffer and nothing being done has made me snap and demand that it's about time Apple did something about it.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:11 AMby ylair,After chatting online and going to the genius bar, I took junkBookPro's advice and called Apple Support. They were indeed much more receptive, understanding, and eager to help. The Mac Senior Advisor agreed to cover the costs of replacing my logic board so I also recommend calling AppleCare Support (https://getsupport.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action) to get somewhere. I am also inquiring along the upgrade gpu route to see if I could pay and have that done since replacing the logic board just seems like a stall from what everyone else has reported. In this vein, I know the gpu is soldered into the logic board and the logic board is specific to the 17" model, but does anyone here know if the chipset can handle a different gpu or its not even physically possible to switch it out even if you could get a logic board and gpu separately? Appreciate everyones input and still advocate for sending feedback with "bug report" as the tag directly to apple in the hopes of actually getting this model recalled. Thanks.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:15 AMby kosovar1,BELOW IS MY (PROBABLY FUTILE) SECOND LETTER TO TIM COOK ABOUT THE FAILING EARLY 2011 MACBOOK PROS.
Dear Mr. Cook or associate,
I bring your attention to the ever-increasingly active Apple Forum thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577?tstart=0 with an astounding 1418641 Views. The thread is about the infamous overheating/failing GPU on the logic boards of thousands MacBook Pros.
I too recently had the experience of a failed early 2011 MacBook Pro 17" with the widely acknowledged AMD Radion HD 6750M GPU defect. The defect is obvious, as are the symptoms: the "blue screen of death,” the screen flickering that precedes failure, tell-tale vertical lines, frequent crashes, and others symptoms that are almost identical to those of other users. I never got a reply from Apple when I wrote some weeks ago. The "geniuses" at Apple Phoenix pretended ignorance of the problem (Were they directed to?) and I find that very insulting. Apple’s head genius in the Phoenix store only agreed to replace the logic board for the standard charge of $322 ($310 +tax). A week later, I got my computer back with the new logic board and the promise that Apple had sold a new logic board and not a refurb. He assured me it was a new logic board with a GPU type different than the one that failed, so I would not have a repeat of the same GPU problem. When I got home, I ran a diagnostic and found exactly the same GPU in the new logic board, only this time, instead of getting the standard 1 yr warranty, the logic bird is guaranteed for just 90 days. Immediately it became noticeable that the overheating and constant fan blowing symptoms are worse now than ever before. GPU and CPU heat have been recorded around the 160 degree range whenever I run even the tiniest movie files or web pages with video and the fans blow constantly. Doesn’t matter from which hard drives I boot from, even a TechTool Pro boot drive with very minimal system software, so this is definitely NOT a software issue. I expect I’ll soon start getting the same blue screens, vertical lines and then eventual crash, just like before and just like most other users have experienced.Apple seems to have lost its focus as a desktop or laptop computer company, devoting it’s huge resources and attention these days to iPhones and fashionable gadgets. They seem to care not one bit about the many thousands of us who, for decades, faithfully bought our computers every year or two. My last acquisition was the aforementioned very expensive MBP, which I bought in Germany for $3,175 because my previous MBP had died just a few weeks past its warranty. And so it goes.
DOES THERE HAVE TO BE YET ANOTHER CLASS-ACTION LAWSUIT AGAINST APPLE TO ADDRESS THIS LATEST ISSUE? That’s such a pity because customer satisfaction used to be such a precious commodity and brought people back to Apple for decades. Despite my long affiliation with Apple, I'm ready to call it quits! My customer satisfaction experiences have been abysmal. I can no longer afford to buy another Apple laptop, especially at the much higher EU prices.
Respectfully,
Eugene Nichols -
Sep 26, 2014 11:32 AMby Csound1,The bulk of my Macs are later than 2011, or earlier (chance) and the only 2011 I have is a 13 (although there is at least one poster here having the same symptoms with a 13) Heat management in electronics has been a daily task for many years now, I take it seriously. All our equipment racks contain their own cooling systems. Macs get treated the same way (even though they are very cheap compared to some of the equipment they replaced) cheap enough to carry 2 for every task.
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Sep 26, 2014 11:36 AMby ylair,I understand that, but what I mean is if this issue spans all late 2011 models, is it a gpu malfunction, logic board, combination of, soldering on all these models, or what is really causing this breakdown? Also again, is it physically possible to put another gpu on any of these logic boards if you had the ability to remove it? Thanks.
